There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:

1. SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.

2. they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.

3. the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).

4. the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.

5. finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.

Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.

The more it goes, the more there will be pressure on the Russian forces to divert their resources there. It seems to be a relatively cheap way for Ukraine to alter the whole battlefield, fighting where they are stronger.

Around 20-25% power consumption reduction against native resolution, that’s neat.

To do the math, an assuming constant volume, a 30C increase corresponds to around 10% increase in pressure. That’s well within the margins of the tyre even if you go to the max rated.

If you then consider deformation and most importantly leakage over several weeks, this is a non-issue.

I have been using Bookstack, I like it though it is missing a few features I would love:

• you cannot insert a video in it
• there is no possibility to comment on a particular text
• the permissions management is only done with roles. That’s fine generally but I wanted to be able to share a specific page with a specific user, and for that I had to basically create a dedicated role for this use.

You cannot really hide it. The launch has to be public to warn airplanes and ships so they can avoid the area. And once the launch is public, such a failure is quite evident to anyone who was interested in following it, so you might has well publish the news instead of trying to hide the unhidable.

The main difficulty for this kind of tug is finding the market. There is currently only a very limited market for such missions:

1. If the customer is big enough, then the rocket itself can do the injection. Otherwise, you can try to find another customer on the same orbit
2. If it is a geo satellite, then it will have electric propulsion and adding a separate stage is hard to justify just by shortened transfer time
3. If you are planning on reusing the same tug for multiple missions, you are fighting the rocket equation. This thruster here makes it really hard, you need more efficiency.

The market fit is quite difficult, and this requires high investment. So very hard problem until we have an actual space economy with people on the moon.

He should have used a 2000 y.o. equipment. Romans knew how to defeat drones: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retiarius

It means that U.S. automakers find it cheaper to have their vehicles made in China and then import them in the U.S., rather than make them directly in the U.S. in the first place.

This means that manufacturing in China is so cheap that even with the tariffs, it is more cost effective to go there. If your goal with the tariffs is to level the game, then this should not happen (no one would relocate like that unless there is a massive gain).

That’s interesting, it looks like I may have a bias on that due to my scientific background.

I always said salt, of sodium chloride for NaCl. Who is using sodium for table salt? The only time I heard that associated was when saying that table salt is a source of sodium, which is true.

Most likely because the news is in English. And why would Natrium be better on an international forum?

It is Sodium in most Latin languages (despite Natrium being Latin), in Hindi and in Arabic. And Chinese has a different root. Among the 10 most spoken languages (according to Wikipedia), only Russian is using Natrium.

Defense money is not lost, it pays people within your country. And you can even decide whether it goes to big corps or small companies.

More accurate data here: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html

Total down over the past 5 years is 355 over 5200 launched. And definitely not 50-100 satellites were lost in a week.

It’s not really major news because the report is inaccurate and they are not dying at any abnormal rate at the moment. The only news is that one website is having issues updating their data and can temporarily display misleading information.

Be careful about news on this. The data coming from satellitemap.space can be unreliable for recent data.

If you look at he work from Marco Langbroek https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/1705562829225410697 or Jonathan McDowell, respected figures in space object tracking, these reports are inacurate.

Instance are far from being simple proxies. While instances can act as proxies for other instances, the aim is to have each instances to have their own communities and be somewhat self sufficient. If you remove the federation, Lemmy (and other fediverse software) still work, it’s just that it is more difficult in that case to reach a critical mass of users.

Sorry, my autocorrect changed its into it’s.

Overlay it with a map of electricity emissions and it will fit nicely with a few small exceptions (like any small country neighbouring Poland, they will have bad air regardless of their own production).

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Tailscale surprisingly was the fastest, even faster than plain Wireguard, despite being userspace. But it also consumed more memory (245 MB after the iperf3 test!) and CPU.

Do we know if this is a variation due to the test protocol or Tailscale is using wireguard with specific settings to improve, slightly, its speed?